- Hello, and welcome to Community Chats, I'm Aley Hammer.
And today we're joined with Vu Cao,
the Dev Ops lead over at MECCA.
Vu, welcome to the show.
MECCA is well known in the beauty industry.
But for those who don't know,
can you start off by telling us a little bit about MECCA?
- Hi, Aley, thanks for having me.
Yes, sure, so MECCA brings global beauty
in three unique store concepts and store environments.
We have Mecca Cosmetica,
which is a high touch, a high service,
and a curation of the world's most lux brands.
Then we have Mecca Maxima,
which is the beauty junky's playground
offering the latest products and trends to explore.
And then, finally, our newest concept, MECCA,
which brings together the best of both,
Cosmetica and Maxima, into the one, large format.
This year is also a special year for us
as it marks our 25th anniversary.
- Wow, your 25th anniversary, congrats.
And, Vu, in 2019,
MECCA became one of the first Australian companies
to deploy Amazon Personalize.
And since deploying this service,
MECCA generates more than 10 million product recommendations
every single week.
So this is phenomenal.
Can you tell us a little bit more about this?
- Absolutely, before we deployed Amazon Personalize,
we had a custom-built recommendations engine
which was quite rudimentary in the parameters
that it could accept,
but also the outputs it was generating
wasn't quite as personalized,
and relevant, and accurate as we would like.
We also had a problem
of having different recommendation engines
in different channels,
and each of them were producing
their own outputs and recommendations.
And so now we're working hard
towards having just a single recommendation engine
that can power all of our digital channels.
So with Amazon Personalize,
we've now been able to provide more meaningful
and relevant recommendations for our customers.
So, for example, we've used Personalize
to completely revamp our customer emailing journey.
So, for example, let's say you pop into one of our stores,
Aley, and you purchase your favorite foundation.
In about two or three months time,
we have this automatic campaign
that knows exactly when you're ready for a top up
on your favorite products.
And then, as part of this email reminder,
it would also offer recommendations
to similar and new products
that's completely relevant and personalized to you.
And the best thing is that our customers
are loving these recommendations,
as we've seen in a 65% increase
in the email click-through rates,
but also an uptick in sales as well.
- Wow, a 65% increase in email click-through rates,
as well as sales, that's amazing, what a great outcome.
And how do you leverage data and analytics
to improve your customer engagement?
- Yeah, we're lucky at MECCA in the way
that we have access to so much rich content and data
throughout all of our channels.
The challenge though is,
how can we make sense of it all
and continue to use this data
to continue to add value for our customers?
And so continuing on from my previous example
with the emailing journey,
email data such as bounce rates,
click-through rates, conversion rates,
as well as web analytics are all analyzed.
And then, for each customer,
we generate an engagement score.
This data is then fed into Amazon SageMaker
where we have custom models
that would generate customer segmentations.
We can then use the segmentations to run A/B tests,
so that we can understand and learn
what other content that our customers
are loving to engage with.
But also perhaps it's an opportunity for us
to reformat the content
to make it a little bit more valuable for them.
- Well, as you say, it's one thing to have access to data,
but knowing how to make sense of it all
is the real key to success.
And it sounds like you guys
are doing a pretty amazing job at that.
And, Vu, what is the partnership like between MECCA and AWS?
- Our journey with AWS
began probably just a little under 10 years ago,
when we started to explore cloud technologies
and how can we use this technology
to continue to elevate customer experience
through building reliable and scalable
when available services.
We started off with a tiny, little account
running probably like a handful of EC2 instances.
And now we have a multi-account strategy
using almost 50 different AWS services.
The partnership between MECCA and AWS has been incredible,
especially within the last five years in particular,
we experienced exceptional growth within the business.
And so to have our AWS team be on that journey with us
providing support and guidance,
and then now they're really an integrated part
of the team as well, which is fantastic.
And there is definitely weeks out there
where I feel I talk to our AWS guys more than my own team.
- Well, I can't believe it's been 10 years already.
You know, from that small account
running just a handful of instances,
to over 50 different services,
it's been a really amazing journey and partnership.
And, Vu, to round off this interview I wanted to ask you,
what are your future plans over at MECCA?
- Can we extend this session, Aley?
Because I can go on for quite a long time with this.
But jokes aside though.
We have so much in the pipeline,
but I would like to highlight a few
of the ones that we're really focusing on.
So to kick things off, I would like to talk
about our exciting digital transformation story,
which is ultimately about creating an integrated
and seamless experience throughout all of our channels.
It's the human connection that creates
that MECCA magic to our in-store experience.
And every single time you come into a store,
it's a very personal experience.
You're sharing something quite private.
And so now how can we recreate this experience
and this warmth throughout our digital channels?
Because every transaction, there's a story to tell.
And then, on the flip side,
our customers are now interacting and engaging with us
in so many different ways.
And so we want to arm
our retail team members with technology,
so that they could get full visibility
into each and every customer's journey
they've had with MECCA
to provide that truly personalized experience.
We also want to continue
building upon MECCA's Dev Ops culture
and Cloud Center of Excellence.
So there's one initiative,
which I've dubbed MECCA Techademy,
which is a formal learning and development program
across our tech stack
and is aimed at both the business and tech teams.
We want to continue to invest in our team members
so then they could be the best version of themselves,
they're armed with knowledge,
and then just go out and create new and wonderful services
and experiences for our customer.
And then, lastly, sustainability.
Sustainability is such a massive focus
for the entire business,
from the ingredients sourcing and resourcing,
the manufacturing, the packaging,
distribution, all the way through to tech now.
For example, we want to ensure that our code is running
as efficiently as possible
and that our systems and services are only
consuming the resources that it only needs.
- Vu, thank you so much.
I mean, like you said,
I would love to extend this session
because MECCA is one of my favorite,
well, sorry to say,
but it is my favorite beauty brand.
So I was really stoked to have you on the show today.
I'd love to have you back in a few months time.
I'm actually going on mat leave, taking a year off.
But when I get back, I really wanna touch base,
hear what you guys are up to.
And I'm so thrilled that you're taking sustainability
so seriously as well.
So that's something close to my heart.
So thank you so much for coming on the show.
And if anyone has any questions
about MECCA and their journey,
please pop them in the comment section below
and we'll get back to you.
Thank you so much.
- Thanks, Aley, it was a pleasure.